The Editor, Sir:

Recently I was listening to a BBC feature on slavery. An African woman was on the programme talking about slavery and the slave trade on the island of Zanzibar on Africa's east coast. First, I must say it is rare that I agree with any programme that seeks to discuss this issue. I cannot remember hearing a more objective programme on slavery

With very strong emotions at the start, this woman, who was the narrator and a Muslim, wanted to know more about slavery. What she related to the public through that BBC programme was not much news to me.

Throughout the programme she told us that virtually all of the people she interviewed felt very strongly about slavery and the slave trade. She also told us of her own disgust. However, she confessed that there was what seemed to be a contradiction.

While probing further, she admitted that some of her own people's very ancestors were themselves actively trading their own into slavery. Also, at the end of the programme, it was confessed that the issue of slavery is being trumped up for political reasons.

Slave owners

While interviewing some of the people of Zanzibar, the narrator was a little surprised to find out that the ancestors of some these same black interviewees were themselves slave owners. Indeed, the narrator felt a little ashamed when she found out that some of her own fellow ancestral Muslims were slave owners!

I have always said, and this point was expressed on that BBC programme, that it was impossible for slavery and the trade to have lasted for so many centuries without the support of the black African leaders themselves.

It is for reasons like these why I say that many of our leaders who continue to condemn slavery and the slave trade are doing so for political reasons. They play upon the almost universal disgust that people now have with the issue. Most of these leaders know very well that slavery is a very misunderstood historical phenomenon.

I am, etc.,

MICHAEL A. DINGWALL

michael_a_dingwall

@hotmail.com